Ideas that came and went
One wacky idea with the Striker concerned the use of 1" thick aluminium honeycomb composite material (Hexcel) to skin the chassis. The Striker chassis is predominantly 1" square section tube, which is extremely well triangulated - particularly as the scuttle area is skinned. This lends itself well to being skinned with rebated 1" Hexcel sheet which would be bonded and riveted. The resultant structure would be extremely stiff and strong, indeed Caterham use this material in the sides of the Superlight cars as an additional safety measure.
I decided against it in the end as it would require the chassis to be made from 1" square section tube with no round section - which is what makes the lightweight chassis light. The rebating process would be fiddly and it seemed likely that the bonding process would be difficult to achieve without accurate rebates, despite me finding suitable adhesives (room temp cure, good gap filling, toughened, good adhesion to metal). Hexcel material is also not exactly cheap (circa £200 a sheet x3 sheets from the UK distributor). Also despite how it looks on paper there are actually few flat panels on the Striker. Jeremy Phillips thought it was a completely daft idea, in the nicest possible customer oriented manner. From a practical point of view, he had a point, but if it worked then the chassis would be probably 10Kg or so heavier than a skinned lightweight version, but significantly stiffer and stronger. You could always use an even thinner gauge material for the chassis and forsake some of the triangulation down the sides, but you would be on your own.
I thought about this for a long time and worked out how it could be done, it would certainly be unique and very effective but in the end it seemed an unnecessary complication when a bit of 16/18 gauge NS4 does the job.
I also considered using carbon composite panels throughout for the chassis panelling, which included some side panels being developed by plays-kool. I will confess that this was an earlier incarnation of the previous idea of using aluminium composite, purely for tarty aesthetic reasons rather than sound engineering. I thought that this would be different and contrast nicely with a bright body colour like red or the Citroen mango yellow that Caterham use. When deciding to go for the clear gel bodywork I asked whether it would be possible to get it laid up with carbon fibre, or even kevlar for the yellow on black effect with no paint needed, but it wasn't. This was purely because of the complications of getting the materials to look neat with a wet lay and also because it wasn't any lighter than the lightweight glass lay-up they used and as such was an unnecessary complication.